Anne F. Hyde examines family life in the borderlands; her carefully wrought portrait of five families reveals the peculiar challenges faced by these quintessential people of the border.

Hyde tries to corral her unwieldy narrative into the stories of five white men and their extended families ranging across North America from colonial times into the 20th century.

Hyde doesn’t gloss over suffering. But in her immersive and humane new book she draws attention to the relationships between white and Indigenous people that made 'strangers into kin,' long before such unions were decried and, in some states, outlawed.

A fascinating history.

Hyde relies on a multitude of sources to establish a broader view of what was occurring from the 1600s onward as fur traders and missionaries traveled deep into the West and engaged repeatedly with various Indigenous peoples. Unfortunately, this larger perspective frequently subsumes the more personal tales of the marriages Hyde considers, unions documented by a much smaller pool of materials. There are also reasonable concerns regarding references in the text to courtships that 'blossomed' and 'love' matches since the individuals involved left limited first-person records, while the historical circumstances raise questions about consent. That said, Hyde’s unusual history does reveal how the realities of marriages between Europeans and Native Americans have been overlooked, why these relationships matter, and what aspects of this mostly unexamined facet of Western history merit further study..

Hyde upends prevailing narratives about relations between Indigenous people and white Americans in this sweeping history.

A searching study.